Forgive me the critics, but the ZX Spectrum keyboard is awesome!

Sort of by accident I’ve create a BASIC game for the ZX Spectrum, very simple concept and not very long. But this article is not about the game, but about the experience.

To review the excellent board Dandanator from Retroshop (article will come up soon), I’ve set up a ZX Spectrum with the board, but also a cassette tape on the side. Because my Speccy doesn’t seem to be in its best shape, I was having problems reprogramming the Dandanator, and while going back and forth with Retroshop, I started typing a small program in BASIC, and it kept evolving until I had the game idea in mind and started typing!

During the time the Sinclair computers were new, I’ve never had one myself, but I spent a lot of time typing on ZX-81’s and ZX Spectrum’s from friends and at school, so I have a good “experience” typing on them.

While the ZX-81 membrane keyboard is awful for “word processing typing” and the ZX Spectrum is not far behind, both keyboards are surprisingly good for BASIC programming.

The keyboard

It is not my intention to talk extensively about the little Sinclairs keyboard for you can find plenty of detailed information about it, but here is a TL;DR version of it.

If you are not familiar with the Sinclar keyboard, it let you type BASIC commands using just one key, or a combination of one or two functions key to give more options for typing advanced commands, functions, or graphic symbols. For example: in order to enter the command PRINT, the programmer only needs to press the key “P” once.

The cursor always displays a reversed letter in it, hinting you what type of entry the computer is expecting at that moment. For example, a “K” indicates that the next keystroke will enter a keyword (e.g. PRINT, LET, etc).

Learning again

I confess that after three decades of not using the Spectrum keyboard for intensive activities like creating a BASIC program, I struggled to get used to the key combinations properly. Probably, like most of the readers, the only combination I knew on top of my head was to type LOAD ““, and using an emulator.

For the first while, I would stop for a long time staring at the keyboard, looking for that command I wanted. I saw me looking first at the first letter of the command (since P is for PRINT), but most of the time, I would only find the command scanning row by row, key by key, inside it, above it, below it…sigh.

I would work in my little game from thirty minutes to one hour, every other day, so it took me roughly one week to feel more comfortable with the keyboard. For the next weeks, I happily saw my muscle memory taking control, making that keyword to appear on the screen in a blink of an eye.

What a great Keyboard

As I write this, my game is almost done and I can’t say enough to praise this little keyboard and its weird key combinations.

Is it that good to be used in a word processor and write a long text like this article? Hell, no! But if we keep in mind how the keyboard was engineered to let users type in BASIC programs, it is remarkable! As soon as you learn the key combinations, you can type code most likely faster than other users could only dream of on other machines, and with fewer typos and less need to waste time in corrections.

I couldn’t agree more. I didn’t write a program on the ZX Spectrum in the last 30 years, but my memory tells me the same experience as you wrote before. The learning curve to master the this kind of keyboard input isn’t very intuitive, but when you did it, it’s some kind of genius insight, and your work begins to be quicker and quicker